A Third Language

Whenever we translate from one tongue to another, we arrive at a third form of speech that sits somewhere between the two. This exhibition suggests that we all live and speak through a third language: a hybrid mode borne of the translations and generative mistranslations between words, cultures, and histories.

Featuring artworks abound with pattern and repetition, for some artists, this visual multiplicity is used to express the more abstract concept of cultural multiplicity, in which the whole is made from many heterogenous yet interlocking parts.

Artists also explore what happens when artistic traditions roam, mutate and brush up against one another. As images are copied and re-copied in different locations, they become enriched by the inevitable mistranslations or ‘glitches’ in the chain of reproduction.

We live in a world of echoes and amalgamations. The artists in ‘A Third Language’ capture this cacophony.

(Image: Iman Raad / Installation view of ‘Days of bliss and woe’ (detail) 2018 / Purchased 2018 with funds from Tim Fairfax AC through the QAGOMA Foundation / Collection: QAGOMA / © Iman Raad)